Posted
by
Soulskill
on Thursday July 29, 2010 @02:36AM
from the making-it-right dept.

Earlier this week, there were reports that large numbers of Modern Warfare 2 players on Steam were getting erroneously banned by Valve's Anti-Cheat software. While such claims are usually best taken with a grain of salt, the quantity and suddenness caused speculation that Valve's software wasn't operating correctly. A few days later, Valve president Gabe Newell sent out an email acknowledging that roughly 12,000 players had been inappropriately banned over the preceding two weeks. "The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game." Valve reversed the bans and gave free copies of Left 4 Dead 2 to everyone who was affected.

Now if Valve wanted to steal customers they would have given them Team Fortress 2. At which point they wouldn't have needed to reverse the bans since the players would be too busy collecting hats to notice.

The entire game is based around the idea of other humans playing with you, not some bot. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I would be very surprised if there were anywhere near the number of people playing single player that would qualify the statement of it having "strong single player". In fact I'd say its probably got one of the weakest single player modes of any single player games out there. Neither I, nor any of my friends h

I do. I have a sucky internet connection, and most of the people I want to play with are on the other side of the planet, so unless we get a time with low traffic and find a decent server somewhere in the middle, someone gets stuck with 400ms pings, which make L4D(2) worthless.

However, as a somewhat mindless zombie killing bit of stress relief, it is fine on the single player mode, and the characters can be quite amusing. Plus, they never shoot you in the face.;)

I like L4D(2) very much for both the multiplayer and the single player. Sometimes you don't want to deal with other people and just want to kill zombies. Sometimes you like the challenge of trying to get through a level on your own on Expert difficulty. Sometimes you don't want to deal with the idiots in pub games while your friends are all offline. While I agree that it doesn't really have a "strong" single player, it can still be quite an enjoyable single player experience. They actually did a good job of balancing that, rather than making it one of those games that is impossible or exceptionally boring to play on single player.

Three options:-Own server(Either paid for dedicated, or just host it while you play). It'll help a bit, one less middleman, but only if the person hosting it has a good connection.-Console command to open the server browser, and just find a good low ping one, no hoping and praying involved. "openserverbrowser"-Force it to only choose servers below a set max ping. Use "mm_dedicated_search_maxping 150".

I meant played the single player through. I played it for about 5 - 10 minutes when the game first came out, mainly to ensure I knew the controls before playing online, but quickly realised how bad the AI is compared to human counterparts

...but quickly realised how bad the AI is compared to human counterparts

The big problem is that Valve didn't make too many changes to the AI between L4D and L4D2, so the bots can't really “deal” with some of the new things (melee weapons especially). IIRC (I only played the game briefly on a friend's account), the original L4D bots were much more useful.

You can play Counter strike with bots, but I don't think you'll see many people playing it that way. I still think it will be firmly in the minority.

I actually know of a lot of adults who do exactly this. They cant be bothered playing online due to all the people who have too much time to dedicate to being FPS ninjas. I have always found that if you are not willing to dedicate an hour per day to playing online games you will probably not get that much enjoyment out of it due to the insane amount of dieing you do for very little killing.

An hour per day might not sound like much, but with a full time job, travelling to work, family, sleep and other commit

I've been buying a few games from Amazon, where they're often cheaper if Valve isn't having some ridiculous sale. That way I still have things to do if my son is tying up my Steam account on World of Goo or Civ.

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost my physical copy of GTA IV somewhere around the house... grrr.

Yes, but getting agreement for this would take sign-off from relevant people in the other company which would take time and hassle which would have to be paid for on top of the remuneration for the actual game units. And it would be more expensive per game - internally the free games would be passed off on balance sheets "at cost" which is probably zero or near zero (unless they have a tortuous internal economy like some of our clients do), the other company (if another company's game were to be used as the

i'm having a hard time picturing a credible scenario where a woman would be prepared to have sex in exchange for a copy of a video game.

Sure, she limps when she walks, and she is gap toothed enough to eat corn on the cob through a picket fence, but in the dark, all women look like sisters. Then again, if you are trying to trade a game for sex, you probably don't look much better either, so maybe it will be a match made in heaven.

That said, this is one of the reasons I have been pro-steam for years. They m

You lack some serious imagination. If you're not familiar with gifts in Farmville and all the new, trashy versions of The Sims, you don't know what gamer women will do for their fix. L4D? Maybe not quite as much. But I'd bet there will still be a fair number who would.

Summary's incorrect, as usual. Valve gave everyone affected a free copy of the game to gift to someone else, and a copy for themselves if they didn't already have L4D2. Essentially, Valve gave out 24,000 copies of L4D2.

They took something about them screwing up in a moderately serious way while doing something people tend to get upset about them doing, and turned it into being about the quality of their customer service while incidentally advertising a rather expensive game. Since it's over Steam, net cost to Valve is some time by their database people fixing the thing they're probably legally liable to fix plus some bandwidth. Damage contained, plus nearly free marketing which would have cost quite a bit through traditional methods.

Whether it's beneficial to them or not, it still shows how good customer service can be conducted to benefit both the company and the consumer. Valve is one of the most community-friendly game developers, which is all the more amazing since they're such a successful company (not just a small indie developer).

Had this happened in a previous Call of Duty game, PunkBuster wouldn't have done a damn thing about it other than releasing a patch. If anyone cries foul at Valve's generous solution, they need to take off the tinfoil hat and also realize that not playing Modern Warfare 2 for a weekend isn't so bad.

They took something about them screwing up in a moderately serious way while doing something people tend to get upset about them doing, and turned it into being about the quality of their customer service while incidentally advertising a rather expensive game.

There's an old saying that it's not the fact that a company screws up that generates ill will, it's the response from the company to rectify the problem.

This is a company that has heard that saying and has taken it to heart. Bravo.

Go a bit deeper than that - the differences between skilled people and untalented people is not that skilled people never make mistakes. It's that the skilled people fix their mistakes fast enough that they don't cause larger problems.

I mean sure, people got banned but that would only be serious if the bans couldn't be undone or something. They got banned, they got unbanned. No problem. Same basic effect as if the servers had crashed or their net connection had died.

It wasn't a serious problem because they dealt with it. The free game (two actually, they gave it to the people and gave them a copy to gift to a friend) is good PR, and should help smooth everything over.

I don't mind that companies make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Anyone who demands perfection all the time is a moron. All I ask is that they acknowledge and fix their mistakes, which was done here. The free game was a good call, to settle people down, especially since many gamers act like an interruption of their gaming is the end of the world.

That means that with your account, you can no longer play on VAC-secured servers on any game

Not true. You get banned for the single game and any other games that rely on the game engine. For example, I have two Steam accounts. Both have Counter-Strike 1.6 and Counter-Strike : Source. One has been VAC banned for CS 1.6. Because of this, every 1.6 engine game is also VAC banned (Half Life, Team Fortress, The Specialist). On the second account, I have CS:S VAC banned. I can't play Garry's Mod, TF2, or any other Source engine game online on that account.

People and companies make mistakes - in the real world, nothing is 100% foolproof.
Now, I know I'd rather go for a company that reacts like this when they screw up, than anyone else. Yes, they are doing this because it'll advertise their products, keep those customers with them, etc...
But why is that a bad thing?

Expensive? I bought it for less then $10 two weeks ago on sale in their store.

Also the customer service is only good when it comes to Valves games. Buy a third party game that doesn't even load? Too bad because you're using a "service" not 'buying a product". This kind of behaviour rewards companies for not even making their games work. There's no reason they couldn't offer refunds. They know how long people play the games, offering a refund to a person that has bought the game for less then a week and hasn

They admitted there was an error and as an apology gave them all a rather expensive game. That's pretty good customer service.

Yup, not bad at all.

Far too many companies these days would have insisted it wasn't their fault.

And I don't think anyone really would have expected much more than simply getting their account re-activated.

Valve could have given away pretty much anything... A copy of Portal or Half-Life or something else that's been around for a while. They certainly didn't need to give out a copy of a newer title like Left 4 Dead 2.

In this case they did the right thing, but what I'd like to know is what would happen if it were a much smaller number affected by the bug. Given that they don't generally give people the opportunity to prove their innocence I'm not sure that they would rectify things if only a small number are affected. I'm not sure they even read messages complaining about seemingly inappropriate auto bans.

Yes I do want to play games through a service that notices there errors, fesses up to them, and compensates the users for the error. It is rare enough to find a company that acknowledges there own errors let alone go out of there way to make it right.

but you aren't even going to consider your option to start your own competing service?

Yeah, because that's reasonable. Valve has been in the industry for 12 years and they've established the biggest digital game distribution platform. You're saying he should consider starting his own service to compete (and do better at making anti-cheat software) because some people couldn't play MW2 for a weekend?

this is far more than "an error" on their part... but an apology and access to content they've already produced and can duplicate trivially at ~no cost is pretty much all they have to give.

What's the cost to them got to do with anything? Apologising is about making the victim feel better, not the perpetrator feel worse. It's a good apology because they actually gave people something they may appreciate, even if there's little cost to them.

[...] for 12,000 people, eliminating any chance that they will pay Valve for it [...]

They actually seem to have handed out two copies to every affected account, i.e. 24'000 copies total. If even half of the gift ones end up with people who'll play them, Valve gets an 18'000 player boost to their L4D2 community and 18'000 people who might potentially mention L4D2 to their friends and invite them for a round of play.Valve gets goodwill by the truckload, a large expansion of their player base and tons of inexp

The way I read it, you only got two copies if you didn't already have the game. If you did, you only get one to gift to someone else. So, the number is likely less than 24,000... but we don't know by how much.

The fucking DRM is NOT what caused this issue. It was the anti-cheating software that got confused when they were in the middle of an update. I hate DRM as much as the next guy but I don't feel the need to blame it for things it has nothing to do with.

Not true - VAC doesn't disable the game entirely, it only stops you from connecting to servers that check VAC. Even if you're branded a cheater, you can still run a private server or play on non-VAC public servers.

And if you do enough "bad things" while operating a motorvehicle, you can get your license taken from you. What's your point? That people should be able to do whatever they want, on whatever servers they want, and never be held accountable for their actions?

Likewise, Valve does not come and take your game away without a refund. You can still play it in single-player mode. You can still set up a private server and play with your friends. You can even still connect to public servers that don't use VAC.

VAC is a tool that server operators -- third parties as well as Valve -- can use to block players who have a history of cheating. You aren't entitled to use their servers; server operators have always been able to ban problem users individually. VAC is just a ban l

So you're saying any DRM that does not shut down the software 100% and stop any and all use of it. Is not DRM?

No. I'm saying a system that the server uses to decide to reject your connection is not DRM. DRM is a client-side limitation.

The acceptance problems of widespread iron clad DRM is not a technical, legal, or moral issue as many make it out to be.

There is, in fact, a significant technical difference between DRM and anti-cheating.

DRM is where you give someone a key and a lock and expect them not to put the key in the lock except under circumstances you've chosen to allow. Since this is technically infeasible when they have control of their own computers, it leads to all sorts of draconian laws and "trusted computing" measures.

This was our mistake, and I apologize for any frustration or angst it may have caused you.

The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game. This wasn't a game-specific mistake. Steam allows us to manage and reverse these erroneous bans (about 12,000 erroneous bans over two weeks).

We have reversed the ban, restoring your access to the game. In addition, we have given you a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 to give as a gift on Steam, plus a free copy for yourself if you didn't already own the game.

To access your own copy of Left 4 Dead 2, visit your library of games in Steam. If you didn't already own the game, it will now be listed among your others there, and is available for download immediately.

Even though you can argue about Steam as DRM, I love what Valve is doing as far as consumer-relations.
"Pirated our game? It's OK, we'll give you more incentive to buy it instead of pirating it."
Gabe Newell is a trailblazer in the video games frontier, and I'm glad we have him.

and not just the cheaters, I wish they'd fix the game on Steam! If you have the Steam overlay on (as default), punkbuster will kick you out of your game! I have to disable/enable this everytime I change games away from CoD.

As good a move as this I can't help but wonder about the comments made by volunteers moderators on the SPUFs (Steam Powered User Forum) about how "VAC doesn't make mistakes", how bans were permanent and indisputable, etc.

I wasn't on the receiving end of one of these bans myself but if I had been I would've felt pretty aggreived to be tacitly labelled a cheater and that my account "was gone", with moderators talking about a computerised system being impossible to fool and never wrong, etc.

As good a move as this I can't help but wonder about the comments made by volunteers moderators on the SPUFs (Steam Powered User Forum) about how "VAC doesn't make mistakes", how bans were permanent and indisputable, etc.

It's not a conundrum, it's just hypocrisy: Valve doesn't really believe VAC is perfect, as demonstrated here, but people don't really care until they get thrown under the bus. It's the same reason the US has 5% of the worlds population and 25% of the worlds prisoners.

Valve has been pretty clear on this, VAC bans are permanent and unappealable. You get banned, you have to buy a new copy, says it in their documentation.

If this has taken a few days to sort out, SOME people (out of 12,000) will have gone out and bought new copies. It's one thing for Valve to give out some of their own product (marginal cost: negligible), I'll believe that they truly care when I hear about them refunding the costs of peoples redundant second copies. Not just allowing them to gift

If this has taken a few days to sort out, SOME people (out of 12,000) will have gone out and bought new copies.

And if they weren't Steam-powered games, then they could now resell those copies as is explicitly protected in the USA anyway by First Sale law.

I would very much like to join a class-action lawsuit against Valve for preventing my exercise of First Sale rights as I cannot resell my copy of Half-Life 2, a short and somewhat boring game which I beat on day one. I probably should have just taken it back to the store and claimed it was defective. If I had known that Steam doesn't even make playable backups at th

And yet I'm supposed to believe there's a massive production cost on digital downloads particularly when it comes to selling a 5MB ePub or 5MB song (that I am not allowed to download again if I lose the song).

I originally did not agree with Valve's tactics but the reality is they're becoming benevolent and good with their business. I just wish the versions of games they sold did not have the same anti privacy measures built into the games as the hard copy versions

THIS is how you handle an issue. You don't wait for a 50,000 posts 1600 pages long thread of disgruntled customers swearing they will never play your game again to form, only to tell people later that you've got "exciting new changes coming in the future" in the same breath as announcing that the unilateral change is getting overturned.

Sounds to me like this could also give a ban to someone who had bad RAM. One bit wrong in an area that gets a signature check and you're gone. Doesn't even have to be bad RAM, if a cosmic ray flips a bit.

This isn't surprising to me. Last Christmas I acquired a for pay hack, I revered it and removed the need to login and phone home (read, made it free), it spanned about 6 games, some Steam some PunkBuster. I sent an email to Steam, sent one to EvenBalance to inform them that I had this and was interested in submitting it to them for dissemination and inclusion into their detection engines. Next day heard from EvenBalance they wanted it, so I sent it. 3 days later that cheat was detected in all PB enabled ser

I'm slightly confused as to how being banned from online servers has anything to do with DRM, given that a game with no DRM could still implement a similar anti cheat system to Valve's VAC.

Assuming MW2 works anything like the Valve games with VAC (I'm thinking this may be unlikely as it has no dedicated servers), when you get VAC banned your account is prevented from playing on VAC secured servers (although the unsecured servers tend to be crap and full of people using cheats).

You make it sound like the block is a personal favour, and that giving you a game is useless, since you have no qualms about picking it up for free. Put short, you don't sound like you're owed an apology or restitution.

2) You could easily have had your password sniffed, possibly even from an uninstalled version of Steam, if you got a virus/spyware in the meantime - many of them lift your details right out of the registry/filesystem because a Steam account is a very valuable commodity. They don't need to "crack" anything - if they have read-access on your computer, they can lift your username/password if you got Steam to memorise it. Once they got banned on y